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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 3229376" data-attributes="member: 4937">Well, since I've been playing since 1980, if I'm not a grognard I'm only a few gray hairs short.  However, in practice this has never been true.  First edition in particular was sprinkled with references to the limitations of wishes.  It's the first edition modules in particular where you are going to find the notes like, "Not even wish will destroy the widget/rescue the character/destroy the box"This is a subset of what is actually the biggest single change between 1st and 3rd.  First edition was a DM centered game.   Third edition is a player centered game.   Neither is really 'better' than the other, because both versions can be run poorly and played in a manner that not everyone at the table will enjoy.   But third edition attempts to make the DM's judgement and experience somewhat superfluous.   All those numbers are thier so that the DM won't, in theory at least, have to decide what happens.   The designers of 3rd edition seemed to want to render the DM into a 'game engine' rather than a 'game master'.Except that EGG has a really good passage in the 1st edition DMG (one of the better ones) where he explains that special circumstances should always trump the rules whenever it makes sense within the game.  I'm thinking of the passage in which he describes the PC's in a temple and the party is attacked by giant apes (IIRC) and one of the players has his character fall onto the feet of the goddesses statue and begin blubbering like a baby and begging for mercy.   In truly extraordinary cases, I think EGG would have broke his own absolutes.Besides, the whole point of my talking about the numbers was to point out that effectively a target DC above what could be reasonably obtained WAS an absolute design.  You just as easily could have written, "The door cannot be opened by any means but..."   They are the same thing.   If anything, the only purpose of the number which is so high as to be unreasonable is to give you some idea of what you'd consider a special case.   Maybe the Barbarian rages, and throws himself before that gargantuan door with a 60 STR, and he throws a 20 for his STR check and you throw 1 for the doors and amazingly the super twinked Barb beats the doors 38 STR result.  You don't really need those numbers to tell you maybe that the player of a super strong character with a super extraordinary result has a reasonable expectation of the normally impossible result, but there they are just in case you do.   Why not let him slow the door for a round even if the rules say that absolutely he can't?  It makes for a great scene, and more than anything else, great and memorable scenes is what makes RPing fun. Absolutely.  It's an extremely influential module, fun and interesting module which had a huge influence on the gaming industry ever since then.   A new DM can still learn all sorts of interesting things about design by reading that module.</blockquote>

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